If you’re like me, you may have driven through tollbooths on an Interstate highway and noticed that Flo — the spokeswoman in ads for Progressive Insurance, has begun appearing everywhere.

The incessant repetition of product advertising across media breeds product familiarity. But it’s a familiarity that doesn’t always register until we encounter the advertisements again in places we don’t expect them and begin to suspect there is a superstructure at play around us that we are unaware of…an uncanny feeling of what Freud termed “the omnipotence of thoughts.”

You know there’s something uncanny going on in American culture when people start donning Halloween costumes inspired by a popular figure. Progressive sells costume kits and doles out advice to Dress Like Flo, and people like to do so, if their imaginary spokesman’s (currently) 5.4 million facebook fans are any indication. Flo is everywhere, partly because we have absorbed her into our cultural personality. Flo is us and we are Flo.

There’s something about Flo that is appealing to the American masses. She never stops smiling and has all the affectation of an earnest clown, coupled with her mission to “protect” (as all insurance promises), so it’s hard not to like her. It could be her appearance that makes her almost “one of us” — the young “working mother” that she appears to be, working hard at the sell, always a true believer in her employer, because it allows her to play caregiver. Like a peppy Maytag Man or Verizon installation man (“Can you hear me now?”), she’s a model worker in some ways — an embodiment of the indefatigable zest the company wants to portray. But her apron is a sign of domesticity as much as it is of her job as insurance seller. And what’s uncanny about her it’s not just Flo’s almost inhumanly joyful personality, but her never-changing appearance. She IS the white apron uniform. She IS the haircut and name badge and lipstick-encircled teeth. It’s an infinitely reproducible look (in costume for both the actress on the commercial and for anyone at the Halloween party).

The television commercials that Progressive produce are quite well done and fully aware of Flo’s status as advertising icon. They are often self-reflexive in a way that incorporates elements of the uncanny. Take the “Superhouse” ad, for instance.

This commercial is more fantasy than message, depending almost entirely on its audience’s previously held knowledge about Flo and the whole oeuvre of Progressive insurance advertising. history. And it is in the strange familiarity of the imagery and the narrative logic of the fantastic that the characteristics of the uncanny begin to unsettle the husband on the sofa (the only character that does not change throughout), who ostensibly stands in for the spectator.

What makes this ad a vehicle of the popular uncanny?

First, the narration literally IS “progressive”: it displays the progressive transformation of a domestic space (the stereotypical family home) into the imaginary world of a Progressive insurance company — by stages, the home comes to resemble the stagey white and abstract set of the Progressive ads: Flo’s lair, if you will. It also displays an erasure of any individuality or personality that might have been resident in the home (though as I’ve said, that home is inherently a template, a stereotype, to begin with). Employing the structure of the Fantastic, the ad is literalizing the figurative , and we are asked to understand what we have just seen through the final metaphor, expressed by an unseen narrator at the very end: “The Name Your Price tool…making your world a little more Progressive.”

So what the commercial is doing is aligning “your world” with Progressive insurance, but we are only shown referents to various tropes in other Progressive commercials. Everything is “strangely familiar” but never quite stable in its reference: Flo is NOT in the ad. She is a ghost that possesses the mother figure, as she mixes her frosting. In cut after cut the uncanny magic of cinematic editing transforms her into Flo’s doppelganger. The walls in these shots become more and more like the set of the Progressive ads, until we get literal indicators (the housewife’s apron bears a logo, the boxed insurance “packages” have replaced books and other items on the shelves, and the “Check Out” sign hangs behind the housewife-turned-Flo-Clone, and in the end two minor characters from older Progressive ads suddenly appear on the couch to make a joke). Step by step, the “progressive” accumulation of signs of the company take over the domestic space…and it is this creeping sense of being taken over (as if buried alive) by the advertising that may trigger a sensation of the uncanny in the viewer.

Ostensibly, this narrative plays out in the mind of the man on the couch, fantasizing over his laptop. This is indicated by his frequent looks up toward the ceiling, the moments of silence during the ad when he seems to not respond or pay attention directly to his wife’s dialogue, etc.

But if we scrutinize the details in the advertisement, the male fantasy becomes even more disturbing. Why does the child on the couch, too, transform into a Flo? And why do the women in this ad seem to be clueless about their own transformation? To the latter point, it would seem they are objects of desire in the husband’s viewpoint — transformed from the subjects of familial love into objects of commerce and exchange, potentially of a sexual nature. How so? A Freudian might point to the housewife’s actions: “mixing the batter” is a metaphor for a sexual act, and the “name your price” line as it is delivered (“I’m looking at it right now”) is a bit of an innuendo for a sexual proposition. This subtle message is reinforced because the result is the figuration of a “baby Flo” — the child on the couch, a genetically-determined Flo, the result of sexual union between the unchanging man on the sofa and the Flo clone mixing her batter.

While a Freudian interpretation like the one above may be a bit laughable, the ad does seem to be entirely involved in “reproduction” in that it is literally engaged in reproducing the memory of earlier ads in the home, and in the viewer’s memory of Progressive advertising. One probably doesn’t normally think of the Flo icon as a sex object (i.e., she is a salesperson figure, not a supermodel selling beer), but every fictional ad is an expression of wish fulfillment. The wish expressed here is a little obscure — if it is male desire, then it mingles sexual longing with a desire for transformation of the domestic sphere into something more like…a workplace. An unconscious recognition of this occurs when the two male characters (who play “competitors” from other insurance carriers) appear on the sofa as if they too have moved in — and immediately ask about the bedroom (“the guest room situation”).

The sexual messages at work here play out at the same time as a domestic familial space is transformed into a commercialized insurance workplace. What underlies it all is not so much sex as familial ideology: a male fantasy about the ideal sexual division of labor. The husband is at leisure, fantasizing on the couch. The mother is essentially working in the kitchen throughout, “serving” her family’s needs. The child is passive and behaved in its unmoving silence. The unique elements of individual personality, familial love relations and female subjectivity undergo erasure, replaced by the generic world of the insurance company.

So of course the commercial cannot be entirely serious or realistic. It remains disturbing, uncanny, unsettling…all because it is not human at all. To me, this ad is a representation of virtually all advertising and how it progressively saturates so deeply into our everyday lives that we cannot distinguish between fantasy and reality, sign and symbol. This intellectual uncertainty, mixed in with unconscious and emotion-laden desire, as well as gendered fantasies of domesticity, stirs up the batter to produce very Unheimlich results.

These issues do appear in other advertisements as well. I’ll conclude by simply sharing the Progressive “Hand Puppet” commercial, in which a woman schizophrenically splits into housewife and Flo puppet, which I think speaks for itself:

While such matters might be termed “uncanny” in the most orthodox sense of that term, one of the interesting elements of these particular reborns is the artistic inspiration drawn from the Twilight series of books. Vampire kids are not an invention of the 21st century — we’ve had them in The Vampire Lestat, and in cinema one is reminded of creatures like the infant monsters from Cohen’s film, It’s Alive! and even Rosemary’s Baby. In the original Dracula by Bram Stoker, there is a classic scene where Lucy herself consumes infants for their blood, in a dark reversal of maternal symbolism. Here we have something of a re-reversal of this anxiety in a representation related to the child that must be nurtured by literally feeding off its mother — here made safe — and inorganic — both dead and yet newly born — through reassuring plastic.

Pop culture is so saturated with zombies that it seems quite silly. Or is it?

Take, for instance, the new (free) add on “Halloween” theme for the iOs GPS app, CoPilot Live. The opening screen transforms the colors to an autumnal trick-or-treaters fantasy with a goofy spiderweb on top (making its opening message — “Buckle Up!” seem far more ominous than it otherwise would)… and it also includes a clever zombie icon for the “Walk” GPS option, as well as funny green dismembered hands as pointers to locations.

It’s probably easy to dismiss this kind of thing as yet another goofy appropriation of horror genre tropes for pure marketing. I prefer to think that anytime you see a “zombified” commodity — perhaps most of all when the object seems ephemeral and totally unrelated to the horror genre — that there is still some true expression of fear there, lurking beneath the kitsch. Something repressed, that threatens to return…

GPS devices are used as maps that synchronize your position on a map through satellite technology. They’re highly scientific, yet I think most consumers treat these devices more like “the magic of everyday life” than as the technology they really are. The “knowingness” of the device comes “from beyond” to not only indicate where you are, but also to direct you on your way. In fact, most of these things SPEAK to us, like some kind of robotic backseat driver. It’s uncanny. Especially when they know more than we do about our location and how to save us from getting lost. A GPS literally enacts the “omnipotence of thoughts” that Freud describes in his foundational theory on Das Unheimlich.

This is why zombies make sense when used as a ‘skin’ for a GPS. It slyly suggests that when we follow the directions automatically, unthinkingly, that we are akin to robots following the programming, driving our cars, virtually on “autopilot.” Underscoring this is the fear of being lost in a strange land. The world of strangers. The place outside of our safe car bubbles, where Others roam.

Sometimes that fear may be warranted, but where there is anxiety there is always a market. And it’s not just GPS skins. Take trick-or-tracker, for instance — an iPhone app designed to help worried parents locate their children while trick-or-treating using their phone’s GPS. Sounds like a useful application of GPS if you’re a helicopter parent, I suppose. Or howabout the GPS Halloween Adventure held in Ewing, VA‘s Wilderness Road State Park? Both use GPS as talisman-like device for survival. Sounds ingenious! But also further proof of how the ‘magic’ we put into these technological divining rods are structures reflecting our fears and wishes rather than an application of science.

My favorite Bizarro comic of recent days involves Mr. Peanut — that dapper mascot of Planter’s nuts — in a scenario that makes plain the inherent contradiction of advertisements that employ cartoon mascots to represent the very same products they sell.

Eating our Icons. (Comic by Dan Piraro)

What IS the appeal of these imaginary spokespeanuts and mascots and similar characters in mass advertising that embody the very same product that their companies would have us consume? How does our brain respond to the cognitive dissonance of a cartoon tunafish selling us tunafish to eat? How does the child’s brain process the implied relationship between, say, the character of Mayor McCheese in the Playland and the Quarter Pounder available at the nearby counter at the local McDonald’s restaurant? How do we disavow the “unnatural” and “disturbing” undercurrent to advertising mascots, as expressed by this surprisingly frank commercial for M&M candies from the early 2000s?

I find this advertisement — featuring Patrick Warburton (Seinfeld’s “Putty”) vastly interesting. Beyond the “unnatural” situation — which I’ll focus on in a moment — the setting of this exchange is very telling. It is located in a convenience store that seems a nostalgic throwback to the general “candy stores” of an unidentifiable past. Why does this matter? For one, it situates the story of the ad in the context of economic exchange, but one where no exchange is really happening, save for the actor’s parental scolding and taking away of the candy. The commentary feels realistic in its dark commentary, but the story is still situated in a fantasyland, and it is one which is aligned — dreamily, hazily — with the past for the viewer. The Ms are like “kids in a candyshop” and Warburton plays the adult parent who comes into the shop to scold them.

It matters quite a bit, I think, that the proprietor behind the register is not minding the store, has his back turned when Warburton walks in, and disappears quickly from the image. This allows a situation to transpire that is odd, because normally the clerk would be the one chiding the candy to stop eating the goods he is trying to sell. Instead, we have candy doing nothing at all but hungrily eating more candy, implying a scenario where “the cat is away, so the mice must play” but also providing a parody of the consumer who merely induges his desire to consume without much thought. The M&M characters are not just cannibalistically, but hedonistically indulging themselves in the store, but doing so in a way that is represented as juvenile and childish, allowing the shopper (Warburton) to take on the role of both consumer and parental authority figure, who speaks, ironically, with the voice of reason. It is as though his consumption is valid, but there’s is not an acceptable display of it. The world without consumerism — the theater of the store prior to Warburton’s arrival — is uncivilized, or as animalistic and bestial as it is cannibalistic. The consumer’s exchange — Warburton’s chiding — employs a civilizing effect on the scenario, with the “natural law” (“you don’t eat your own kind…it’s unnatural”) being applied by the consumer’s authority.

This is not the book of Deuteronomy; this is an M&Ms commercial. Commerce is the operative word. The M&M’s try to swap their “colors” but this mutual exchange is not acceptable to the consumer, because it is not a “real” exchange with any symbolic gain. There needs to be some semblance of gain: thus, the consumer takes the candy bags away — getting it all to himself in the process. The popping of an M&M on the way out the door is a symbolic reward, but it also suggests quite clearly: you don’t eat your own kind, but a superior being is free to eat the lower forms…like the juvenile, animalistic, cannibalistic, uncivilized candy. In other words, a hierarchy between parent/child and consumer/product is reaffirmed here and that is the key lesson of the commercial’s “story”: you are not free to gobble up the goods of capitalism — you need to pay for the privilege, and paying makes consumption of ANOTHER KIND perfectly okay.

In other words, it rationalizes the exploitation of the other, in a very self-congratulatory and superior way.

Perhaps I am over-analyzing what amounts to a darkly comedic joke, but often such jokes do relate to unconscious desires, and one of the lessons of the Uncanny is that laughter is just as much a response to the return of the repressed as is a scream. As this commercial and the Bizarro comic up above make clear, there is a cannibalistic undercurrent to the funny and comedic world where animated icons and product spokesmen are normalized. Why else does the Pillsbury Doughboy giggle when we put his brethren children in the oven? Why else does the Michelin Man smile when he asks us to drive on the very rubber flesh that constructs him?

Advertisers employ the literary conceit of personification and the technologies of animation (or costuming) to lend their product an aura of “life” — this, preposterously, gives these icons the implied power “beyond nature” that comes with their status. But it is not so much the living-dead commodities that are embued with this power. It is the manufacturer — the magic machinery of the dough factory, the tire factory — that are attributed with some “secret” power in the process. This is what is meant by “commodity fetishism”; we begin to treat the products of the factory as if they were created by a god or a token of a higher being, instead of something created by the hands of man. Advertising, as Raymond Williams has put it, is a magic system that perpetuates this fetishism of commodities. This may sound like a lot of weight to put onto the back of Mr. Peanut or an M&M candy, but one of the lessons of studying the popular uncanny is that the more unnecessary and empty a consumer good, the more the supernatural is drawn into its marketing and advertising to sell us on its value. If one colored bag of candy is the same as any other, then perhaps the claim that “you don’t eat your own kind” is really betraying a secret fear that this economic system really is a form of self-cannibalism, after all, by trying to disavow it through an imaginary alternative universe, where what we eat is not us, and is not ours, but something magically Other altogether.

The Sultan’s Elephant is a giant marionette parade that is so artfully done, it strikes one as uncanny. As I wrote in November, most parade floats have an uncanny appeal, but in this case the doll’s appearance seems much less mechanical (ergo, more organic) than all the visible equipment and support needed to operate it. The eyes are what do it for me: on the elephant, especially, who’s segmented metallic trunk is a monstrosity. There is a backstory here, about an elephant who travels in a time machine, and it is inspired by the work of Jules Verne.

If you don’t already know, LOLcats are artfully captioned photographs of animals, as in the image above. They’re pretty funny, entirely created by the visitors to icanhascheezburger.com (whose domain name refers to one of the first LOLcat images that got widely distributed online and started this whole thing). Like many online “sharing” sites, I consider LOLcats a fantastic form of new media folk art that attests to the popular draw of the uncanny.

How can a cute little kitten be “uncanny”? The given framework for these captioned photos imbues the subject of the image (the cat) with a language it does not speak (a regressive, childlike “kitten” language of its own invention that gives the cat a distinctive “voice”), blurring the boundary between human and animal. Freud calls this “the omnipotence of thoughts” in his article on “The Uncanny” — a psychological projection inherent to animistic beliefs and anthropomorphic fantasies. Thus, it is quite normal that this unnatural and imaginary language of the LOLCAT is the equivalent of “baby speak”: the animals are really like children more than they are like cats. The language in the caption, moreover, matches the human-like expressions and gestures in the image so well that a spectator may be struck by the synchronicity at play, and perhaps feels the uncanny affect because reality (these are actual photos) and fantasy (the imagined/joke situation identified by the caption) become blurred, if only for a moment, springing us into laughter. Not all the LOLcat images are about danger and death (as the one above — “nositz!”), and rarely are they “dark” or “scary” in their affect, but the humor can be intellectually unsettling because there is often a “secret” desire that the cat seems to be expressing in its caption which also reminds us of Freud’s discussion of the Uncanny as an expression of that which was to remain a secret (for him, the Repressed), suddenly returned and revealed. Our childhood wishes (for a pet, like a doll, that can talk) seem actualized.

Perhaps it is not so surprising, then, that the group responsible for “LOLCats” would build on their popularity by hosting a similar “photoshopping” site in the form of a “doppelganger” maker: totallylookslike.com.

The pictures that users upload speak for themselves, by displaying side by side graphic associations. Most users upload pictures of celebrities and film characters that look alike, as if they were unintentional “doubles” for one another by virture of their physical features and poses.

What makes this “uncanny” is not simply that they look like long-lost-twins, but they also provide the sort of “a-ha!” moment of recognition that Freud talks about in his essay on “Das Unheimliche” — the click of comprehending a “secret” correspondence, as if — with the image above, for instance — the unspoken inspiration behind Tim Burton’s artistic treatment of The Penguin was suddenly unveiled.

Of course, there are also “natural” lookalikes, or body doubles in the popular imagination. More common on totallylookslike.com are jokester post that bend the rules a bit to generate humor in ways that touch on uncanny similarities to make a point.

Here we have “New York” — a realiTV personality — matched up with Janice, a character from The Muppet Show. Yes, they both wear too much mascara and lip gloss. Is that a sufficient condition for them to be lookalikes? Or is this simply a photographic slur?

What makes this “uncanny” is not simply the unexpected correspondence between the appearances of these TV “celebrities,” but the momentary confusion that opens up between puppet and human being when first glancing at the images side-by-side. Consciously or not, there is a degree to which the person who is making this visual pun is calling “New York” no more than a media puppet. The aggression “revealed” by the uncanny logic of this joke could betray a racist or sexist hostility, as well. But beyond this hostility, perhaps there lurks a suggestion that this form of folk art has the ability to disempower the dominance of mass marketed artforms, such as the “manufactured” celebrities and characters of popular TV, through uncanny expressions of mockery and parody.

The site, at its most brilliant, can be revelatory of how forms of new media folk art perform populist expressions of resistance to (if not an outright subversion of) dominant discourses, by taking familiar images of power and status (often embodied by celebrities) and employing them in unintended ways to make a counterpoint. Above, the Vogue magazine cover is taken to task for not only suggesting something racist in its treatment of an African American basketball star as an animal (its “King Kong” reference — which is similar to the Muppet joke above), but also by lowering the ‘high fashion/high art’ status of Vogue down to the level of mere propaganda (the Army poster that originally intertextually borrowed from Kong).

Of course, the comparison attempted in the ‘totallylookslike’ image above is a bit of a stretch on behalf of the person who posted it, because they could have easily just paired the Vogue cover with an image from the King Kong film itself, which it clearly alludes to. Thus, we feel the critic, rather than the creator, at play, being highly selective, and the joke therefore doesn’t quite succeed on the level of the uncanny. Anything smacking of a critical human agency at play — a mediator — reduces the uncanny affect to a mere joke. The person who is making the comparison cannot be present for the uncanny response to “work” — it is like spotting the zipper on the monster’s back in a horror film: it betrays artifice and it’s “magic” is therefore disempowered.

In the above, a rock band’s album cover is equated to a familiar popular photograph that tabloid journalists famously proclaimed to be proof of an alien landscape or the “face of god” on Mars. The supernatural “face” is apparent in the accidental cast of shadow, itself an uncanny appearance. But anyone looking at the image of Queen next to it recognizes the latter as a carefully posed and purposely abstract work of photographic art, if not also a nostalgic memory of something they may have forgotten in their record collection. It is a clever comparison. And it’s quite funny. But it’s not quite uncanny. What we have, actually, is art referring to art — photos referring to other photos — and ultimately this is true of the entire site.

What the site really shows us is consumers of popular culture trying to make sense out of the infinite stream of messages and images that circulate in the media. That sense can only be an allusion or a visual pun — the associative logic of the dreamwork. What is the dream of icanhascheezburger.com? Perhaps it is about what its namesake reveals: an inner child crying for junk food. Only here we have the commodification of art into something resembling a cheesburger. The dream-wish expressed by the site depends on a withdrawal from reason and a repression of our awareness that popular art is a commodity, a manufactured experience that substitutes for the authentic. By pointing out the “doppelgangers” of mass culture through visual puns and pop culture allusions, the site is like a church of the popular uncanny, its posters bearing witness to “miracles” of fantastic correspondence.

In that original post, I wrote: “We always already understand that advertising is manipulative and fake, and yet when the flaw appears, the optical illusion is shattered — the collision of consumerist fantasy against marketing reality is sometimes felt as a return of a repressed desire.”

My thinking presupposed that such freakish bodily anomalies as the giant hand image above were accidental, like Freudian slips. Here the freak skewing is intentional and inherently artistic. Why might it still strike one as uncanny?

Perhaps it is the various contradictions embodied in the image: the smoker’s fantasy (smoking makes one look younger, feel relaxed, sophisticated, etc.) is at once contradicted by the way smoking “stunts” growth and can lead to birth defects. And it’s not just the body anomaly that triggers these feelings and negative affect. Note the empty coat hanger dangling from the knob, right beside the smoking girl, dressed in an outfit that calls attention to itself with its bold color in a sparse white room. She herself is positioned in a mirror image of that dead white space, where another knob would be (behind her head). Her shadow seems to be peeling away from the hanger. The implied idea is a sort of before-and-after effect: if the smoking continues, the narrative suggests, she will soon be “out of the picture” (reinforced by the absent mother off screen who the kid is implicitly glaring at). The empty room with its bare wire hanger is a harbinger of death.

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On the Uncanny…

One can read now and then in old accounts of journeys that someone sat down in an ancient forest on a tree trunk and that, to the horror of the traveler, this trunk suddenly began to move and showed itself to be a giant snake…. As long as the doubt as to the nature of the perceived movement lasts, and with it the obscurity of its cause, a feeling of terror persists in the person concerned.— Ernst Jentsch, “On the Psychology of the Uncanny” (1906)